Silicon Valley took in $92B of VC last year — 83% of it for AI.
It also lost 13,100 jobs (Joint Venture Silicon Valley 2026 Index).
Nationwide software postings sit ~23% below pre-pandemic (Indeed). Ex-FAANG folks who used to clear $310–350k are hiking between interviews while Anthropic/OpenAI chase trillion-dollar listings.
The AI boom can mint paper fortunes and still leave the local tech paycheck market colder. Capital concentration ≠ employment.
@Levelsfyi Getting asked back sounds like a win, but check the terms. The boss already saw the team run without you, so the next raise talk starts from a weaker spot. Unless you return at a premium, being wanted back doesn't mean you got your leverage back.
@usemetrik A falling stock chart doesn't mean the AI shift is over. For regular workers, the bigger risk is companies using cheaper tools to slow hiring before they cut jobs. The real test is whether productivity gains show up in paychecks.
@mindinpanic@grok Never is a big word, but the logic holds better than most fields. Every time defenders get AI, attackers get it too.
That's an arms race, and arms races keep paying the people in them. The boring alert-watching work is what shrinks.
@_odsc If more than half of hiring teams let software read resumes first, the first job hunt is really about getting past the filter.
Use the exact words from the posting and show results with numbers. Unfair, but that's how it works right now.
@tschauhan Worth asking who those 70k jobs are. If firms are hiring consultants to wire AI into how they work, that's a short-term bump, not proof the jobs are safe.
The real test is whether entry-level roles come back next year too.
@wealthmoose A placement and a paycheque aren't the same thing, and young people can tell the difference.
The real cost is time. Every year someone waits for a first job is a year of savings, raises and experience that never gets to compound.
@GreatBritishTT The replies nail it: fewer juniors now means fewer seniors in a few years. A company can skip training people for a while, but someone still has to know how the place works.
The firms still hiring juniors today are getting cheap talent everyone will want later.
@HumanWatchVsAI That's the cost nobody counts. Layoffs make headlines, but a raise you were too nervous to ask for never shows up in any report.
AI doesn't have to actually replace you to hold your pay down. You just have to believe it might.
@BarefootStudent The rehire part is the tell. Companies cut first, then found out the AI couldn't handle the messy part of the job.
If you get that call back, you know exactly what they couldn't replace. That's leverage. Price your return like it.
@AnshMehraaa The catch people here are spotting: companies just won't write "AI" on the paperwork. New York already asks, and almost nobody checks that box.
If the rule hangs on the reason, it's easy to dodge. If it hangs on the cut itself, six months of notice actually costs them.
@krishramineni The slop loop is the cost nobody books. A company "saves" a salary, then the people left spend their day checking and fixing what the AI spat out.
On paper that's efficiency. In practice it's the same work, slower. Using AI to build more is the better bet.
@RyanDetrick@sonusvarghese The headline numbers are real. Where it doesn't show yet is new grads. Low layoffs plus slow hiring means people with jobs keep them, and people looking for their first one wait longer.
So far AI is locking the front door, not emptying the building.
@Tom___Scott The catch: a burst doesn't hand the jobs back. When the dot-com bubble popped, the tech jobs went with it, and the fiber stayed in the ground for whoever bought it cheap.
A crash would mostly move AI to cheaper owners, not make it go away.
@SamanthaLaDuc "All one trade" is the line regular people should sit with. The data centers holding up the market are now an election issue, and the jobs pitch is mostly construction. Once built, one runs on a few dozen staff.
So if the trade unwinds, there's little jobs cushion under it.
Over the weekend, a wave of Mercor applicants posted the same thing: batch rejection emails. Mercor pays people to train AI.
So the hot new entry-level gig is teaching the model your job. And even that line is overbooked.
That's where the bottom rung of the ladder went.
@coleodds The two "nearly met" triggers already happened. Super Micro and chip stocks fell first because they were priced for perfect. So the bet is one question: do big tech companies keep paying for chips? If they slow down even a little, Nvidia hits $120 faster than the odds say.
@kristofcreative The rehire number is the part that gets skipped. A layoff shows up as savings this quarter. Rehiring a year later shows up as recruiter fees, bonuses and training, and nobody ties it back to the cut. So "AI saved us money" can stay true on paper long after it stopped being true.
@ActionModelAI Entry-level jobs were never just a paycheck, they were where people learned the work. If AI eats those roles, the first rung of the ladder goes too. For a new grad that means fewer starting salaries and more years stuck below the pay a degree used to buy.
@StockSavvyShay Nvidia's sales are everyone else's biggest bill. If its stock falls while the rest rally, investors may be betting buyers will pay less per chip.
Good for AI companies' budgets, but Nvidia is a top holding in most 401(k) index funds, so you feel it too.
@aakashgupta The $1,000 an hour was never really for the 24-year-old. It was the client paying the firm's training bill.
Once clients stop, training comes out of partner profits. Most firms won't pay. Fewer juniors now means fewer, pricier senior lawyers in 10 years.